What Kind of Learner/Student Are You?
Dr. Don Stierman -
05/26/2009
A researcher was curious about motivation in elementary school students. Some give up in the face of an academic challenge while others are motivated by a challenge. The former group tends to avoid taking risks while the second group enjoys going where they have not gone before.
Is your primary goal to learn or to perform well? Emphasis on standardized tests has conditioned many students - and school administrators - to view high test scores as an end itself. Never mind that standardized tests are intended to provide some measure of academic achievement!
Scientists tend to have learning, not performance, goals. When we learn, grades take care of themselves. My teaching style and testing strategies reflect my bias that favors learning over performance.
Read this article on "The Effort Effect" and then ask yourself:
My first major confrontation with performance-minded students was as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Assigned to teach physics (in Spanish) at a teacher training college in Honduras, I faced students who had memorized and regurgitated facts (not always correct) for some 12 years. They expected a list of questions and answers that they would reproduce at test time and then forget. They complained to the school's director that they were not being told what would be on my tests. The director understood the problem, that rote learning was not what the country needed in the next generation of high school teachers, but, this was going to be a tough nut to crack.
I began the next class by stating "Aristotle wrote that light objects fall slower than heavy objects. Was Aristotle correct?" The students all said "Of course." I then said "Galileo wrote that heavy objects and light objects fall at the same rate. Was Galileo correct?" The students said "Of course." I then pointed out the fact that the statements made by two great men were contradictory. They could not both be correct. So, who WAS correct? "Well, you tell us, prof." I replied "ME? Am I Aristotle? Am I Galileo? How can we discover which statement is correct?" Note - it was important to break the link between the authority who made the statement and the statement itself, else the debate would revert to arguing Aristotle vs. Galileo, a pointless exercise. One light bulb lit up and a student suggested 'Let's do an experiment to find out.' A few minutes later one team of students dropped pairs of objects from the 3rd flood balcony while a second team took notes on which object reached the ground floor first. We did a lot of experiments over the next 3 semesters, several taking advantage of that 3-story vertical distance. When a traditional European teacher was assigned to teach optics, the fourth semester course in physics, students complained to the director that all they were getting were facts to memorize and equations for plugging in numbers, and were not doing experiments involving real world optics.
At least 2 of these students went on to earn Ph.D. degrees and are now teaching physics at that university.
Please feel free to discuss this on the bulletin board under the 'educational goals' topic.
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